Michal Čihař - Archive for Jan. 1, 2010

Activity of our current Chinese translator pushed me to do some work on localized documentation for phpMyAdmin.

The biggest change is that I lowered ratio for generating translated documents from 70% to 15%. I know 15% is quite low threshold, but I think showing partially translated documents is better than nothing. Especially for those like Chinese where the translation does cover installation instructions but not rest of document.

Also now header of each translated document points users where to improve the translation, so hopefully we will get even more contributors. Anyway if you're interested in it, just go to our translation server.

In addition to MySQL, the phpMyAdmin demo server now provides also MariaDB. It is based on OurDelta packages.

So you can now choose either MariaDB or MySQL on login screen and play with either of database engines.

As can be already visible from our SourceForge.net devel page or from repository listing, there are already some Git repositories for phpMyAdmin. They are not yet being used for development, they are there just for developers to get used to new workflow. The only exception are scripts and localized_docs repositories, which were made master as of today and will not receive updates from SVN anymore.

Anyway the repository should have same content as SVN (as of yesterday) so if you find any problems with that please let me know so that I can fix migration magic.

It might be quite premature, but in phpMyadmin we've started our preparations for this year Google Summer of Code. This is basically just one of followups to the team meeting at FOSDEM, where we decide to apply again this year, but to try as hard as we can to be standalone project and not hidden inside of MySQL. We're grateful for participation in their project, however we feel it would be easier to manage if we're standalone project.

So if you are a student who might be interested in participating, you can already browse our ideas list (this time PHP coding skills are not strictly necessary as I've given there a documentation improvements also) or come with your ideas and follow our student checklist, to see what you can do to get accepted (in case we're accepted to GSoC).

It took some time since last Photo uploader release, but here is yet another release to fix upload to imageshack.

The main reason for me to go to FOSDEM this year was to meet with other phpMyAdmin developers to be able to discuss some things personally rather than on mailing list or irc.

We had quite a big list of topics to discuss and besides discussed some other things which will be made public at some point later.

The good thing is that both my proposals were accepted, so we're about to migrate to Git, what will make our development less blocked by slow SourceForge.net VCS server (what mostly affected people sitting in Europe). The migration will happen shortly, I expect to provide testing repository during next few weeks and we will switch for real once all developers get used to it.

The other important change is to switch our translation system to Gettext. The primary motivation behind this is to allow translators to use wide range of standard tools available for po files and also to allow web based translation using Pootle server in similar way we currently handle documentation translation. I have already prepared the migration plan to Gettext, but it will not happen before migration to Git as I want to benefit integration of Pootle with Git, what makes translations directly commit to the local repository.

In last few days I spent some time with travel agenda. Tomorrow morning I am leaving for FOSDEM, so I'm arranging last minutes things like online checking. Whoever wants to meet me just drop me an email or just check things I want to visit and find me there.

Meanwhile got open registration for Debconf 10, so when I was in travelling mood, I also filled in that one. Right now it looks like it will be quite tough for me to pay this trip, but there is still some time to sort it out :-).

I always thought Gammu to be workaround for phones whose vendors do not provide software for your favorite operating system. We try to do our best job to work with variety of phones, even though this is hard and never finished job.

However today I was really surprised to find out that some phone vendor built their official application for managing phone on Gammu. The application is of course closed source and available only for Windows, but this does not change anything on the fact they use it. They seem to have modified code slightly, adding some new functions and removing others, separated the code to several DLLs, however I'm 100% sure it is Gammu as they use some unique (read awful) things we have in our code.

I'm not going to disclose their name right now as I want to give them fair amount of time for reaction on my asking for sources. But you will for sure find more information later in my blog.

PS: Gammu is of course not the only free software used inside this application, you can find more there (and you will find there more than I did if you will look longer than few minutes I spent on examining rest of code).

I know this is quite premature as we're just about to release 3.3, however development on 3.4 has already started in SVN and we've already implemented more than 20 requests from our features tracker. This is even bigger number than release 3.3 will have!

Well the fact is that most of these things are cosmetic or tiny improvements, on the other side some of them were requested for very long time (the oldest one currently dates to 2003).

The new features bring things such as direct blob download (thing we definitely should have earlier), links to documentation for SQL commands in highlighted SQL (what was quite easy, but nobody requested such thing and I added the feature after seeing that Adminer does this), possibility to directly bookmark most pages or exporting user privileges. See ChangeLog for more detailed list of features.

You can try all new features on our demo server.

I just published three new security issues on phpMyAdmin. They are not exactly something what you would call new as you can see from CVE ids and even from phpMyAdmin version which does fix them (none of them existed in 3.x branch and were fixed in 2.9.10 for 2.9 branch).

However they got assigned CVE ids recently what means that we should tell about them to our users even when we don't think these are that important. So don't be frightened of them :-).